Robotics Trends Feature

Posted: 10/01/2004

Re-Assembling Robots Stick Together to Perform Tasks

Dartmouth Robotics Lab, part of New Hampshire’s Dartmouth College, claims to have developed the first control methods that guarantee self-reconfiguring robots will not fall apart as they change shape or move across a surface.

“It is possible to develop self-reconfiguration capabilities in a way that has analytical guarantees,” said robotics scientist Daniela Rus. “Understanding exactly how your system works and when you can trust it and when you can’t is very important.”

Much like Transformer toys, self-reconfiguring robots are made of multiple sub-assemblies which can attach together in different ways to perform different tasks. Rus’ speciality is ‘lattice robots’, machines made from identical cubic sub-assemblies.

A lattice robot could, in principle, assume a long thin shape, crawl through a small hole, then assemble itself into something useful on the far side.

Controlling this morphing process through intelligence distributed throughout the cubes is complex. “Since we are talking about potentially very large systems, with thousands of individual parts, it’s important to consider distributed control and planning,” Rus said. “And parallel and distributed algorithms are hard to guarantee.”

The Dartford team deduced “about a dozen” rules that instruct lattice robots how to roam over terrain, build tall structures, overcome obstacles or enter closed spaces through small tunnels.

“Rus and colleagues analysed the simpler rules for correctness, then developed automated methods to prove the complicated ones worked as well,” said Dartford.

Future activities include developing techniques for lattice robots to learn their own rule sets for complex tasks.

For lattice root videos, see: http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/robotlab

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